Lesson from America for the Conservatives

lessons to be learnt: Prime Minister David Cameron 'would be foolish to ignore the lessons of the Tea Party'

When they elected Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States two years ago, American voters sent a historic message of tolerance, conciliation and renewal to a world still reeling from their disastrous invasion of Iraq.

On Wednesday, in mid-term elections, U.S. voters rejected America’s first black president and with their endorsement of numerous ‘Tea Party’ candidates from an amorphous grass roots movement of the Republican right, jolted the Washington political establishment.

In doing so, they sent an important message to other democracies in the West, reminding their citizens they do not have to tolerate liberal political elites who lose touch with the concerns of the men and women who put them in power.

In the end, of course, it was the economy that did for the President’s party. Put to one side his botched implementation of universal healthcare, the U.S. today is in dire straits.

The housing market is on the floor, unemployment’s at 10 per cent, nothing has been done to reduce dizzying indebtedness, and the country is relying on the junkie’s panacea of printing yet more money.

But more significantly, many ordinary Americans rejected President Obama’s vision of an intrusive, expensive, and bossy state, in favour of a smaller, cheaper and less interfering government.

They renounced slick presentation and image in favour of belief and substance. Above all, they called for political leaders who understood their lives.

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Comparisons between nations are invidious, and David Cameron’s determination to reduce the size of the state is in sharp contrast to President Obama’s spendthrift refusal to come to terms with the U.S. deficit.

But the Tory leader would be foolish to ignore the lessons of the Tea Party. Increasingly in Britain, there are countless voters who feel utterly disenfranchised.

Millions of Tories have to bite their tongues as they see manifesto pledge after pledge broken by Mr Cameron’s team. Liberal Democrat supporters feel the same.

So Mr Cameron would do well not to forget that the overwhelming majority of the country is Eurosceptic and increasingly frustrated by the perversity of the Human Rights Act; that Britons are desperate for a government that gets a grip on immigration; that taxes are hammering every level of society but hitting the lower middle classes hardest; that lifting the burden of red tape on small business is more crucial than giving a few more rights to employees, and that letting violent criminals avoid prison is giving them a licence to reoffend.

Those are the concerns of the electorate that put the Tories in Downing Street and if they abandon them in the name of political calculation, all the coalitions in the world won’t prevent their annihilation at the polls.

The cap comes off?

Getting immigration under control after ten years of Labour laxity was a centrepiece of David Cameron’s election campaign, and at the heart of his plans was a cap on economic migrants.

But yesterday the Prime Minister suddenly announced that transfers between different arms of international conglomerates are to be excluded from the new rules.

This sounds reasonable, but under Labour this loophole meant 350,000 migrants - many of them cheap alternatives to British workers - coming to the UK.

Mr Cameron’s decision to back down - even taking into account vague promises that low paid workers will still be capped - is very discouraging.

It calls into question his more important promise to more than halve net migration, reducing it to ‘only’ tens of thousands.

If the Coalition isn’t going to achieve this goal by reducing economic migration, then they will have to make even deeper cuts in student visas, but some universities claim this will bankrupt them.

In the meantime, it looks like another election pledge is about to be broken.